Some Doubt About Yellowstone

On our move eastward, Seamus and I stopped in several of the country's most beautiful national parks, some of which elicited some surprisingly skeptical poems like this one.

They tell us
it's natural
though we killed
the wolves to replenish them.

The geysers are controlled
by the wizard of oz,
sulfur yellow the imaginings
of that man
behind the curtain,
or the raw work of a man
in the crust of the earth,
he is injecting
blue food coloring
for the droves of RV drivers,
and the plump house wives in
pre-faded Yellowstone sweaters,
and the creaky bones of the awe-less,
whose hats are blown
onto the rust-mats
surrounding the unbelievable cauldron: the grand prismatic spring.

But mountains tell a true story;
their upper halves lifeless,
dusted with sugary snow,
their foothills unmolested even
by trails.

Trails are the way we know nature,
a solid human pattern in
unknowable greatness:
boulder rocks, marmots,
glacial creeks,
downed trees covered by nothing
but the silver
they've been given
for their absence of bark.

The grand prismatic spring, Yellowstone National Park.

from wikipedia

Flash Fiction Anyone?

Check out the flash fiction I have been writing at http://lizfairchild.wordpress.com

It Happened Before

Some say it is a misfired
synapse,
this moment that seems
like a memory.
In the initial moment,
the waking moment of the dream,
you wondered
how you could be in a situation
so ridiculous.

"They used money against me
while I was asleep"

Poetry that replaces journal,
journal that replaced memory,
poetry that replaces something else
or sleep.

"They used money against me while I was asleep
because I was vulnerable"

Veins of roads,
webbing land,
creating ownership
and islands,

"They used money against me while I was asleep
because I was vulnerable in money"

I must touch everything
or how will we know it?

excerpt from Faulkner's, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem.

The Season

The weather conspired to keep me here.
In the fly infested
flame of last spring,
heat boiled my intentions
of leaving
into a syrup sweet enough
to keep me. that spring turned to the next,
and because I
found a moment,
the weather returned to
its normalcy, sprinkling
rain on
weather beaten bicycles,
its rhythm biting
pavement with familiar syncopation.

National Poetry Month!

The first week of poetry. More to follow...

April 1

How many revolving
painful
situations
drummed up from
an arbitrary heart of glass,
How many unimportant
leaps
of anger
drudged up from an ashtray
how many more azaleas and
fuschias; the flowers of my childhood,
closing up and eating all but
happiness.

April 2

Waking from anxiety to the mental purr
of half written poetry,
ideas that were profound in the silence of night
but were lost to the mind of waking morning.

And what was lost?
just neurons firing a random sequence,
neurons lacking the sense of an ego.

April 3

A poetic mind cannot be kept,
it is a crater dug out in the ordinary,
a crater temporary; soon filled by
a bulldozer dumping money.

April 4

The camel humps of the dunes,
blackbirds too ordinary for this landscape,
fog the color of sand.

April 5

get out of the city.
run from the city.
the city is a machine
the city is an invention
the city made needs
needs created by the city
needs that grip you to the city you never needed.

April 6

I've sat myselft next
to the same situation
in this, the present.
"The future doesn't exist," he says,
after an explosion.

Like she is saying, this girl I don't know,
The fat rich white man wipes his ass
with the paid dollars of my debt.

April 7

Bright patches through the clouds,
people who flinch in the sun, or
flinch in the rain, or in the glow
of the sun after a violent rain, the rain
that lasts only long enough for me to run through it.

A work in progress

A flash fiction piece I am working on a for a contest, the theme being, "In the Woods". The word limit is 150.

He worked on the bird reserve, a fair ways out of the city. I took the train there. He'd been given a house as payment and was making alcohol in the kitchen cupboards. We took cups full of the stuff and slunk off to his room. It tasted like fizzy lemons. There were pressed plants hanging from the walls, their latin names written below each on an index card. He told me a stories about a local women with a gnome garden. She killed her husband by pushing him onto the train tracks. He was a conductor and she took his job after killing him.

We went on a walk around the estuary; a dried out track, a clump of forest off to our right. Over there in that forest, he'd said, I found a ghost lamp lit up, with an extension cord leading off to nowhere.

Some Poems About the Revolution

These poems are in response to the comic book Seamus is currently inking/visioning.

Refulgence

It was a new text, and

his refulgent eyes shone in it brightly.

no sudden darkness, for a candle was lit.

The text did not contain any life, it was

a story about something stationary, an inanimate thing

in a place filled with nothing.

Its brevity alarmed him (there could be no plot without a life)

but its few words contained poignancy.

Effulgence: The Middle of the 17th Century

Poignancy!

Poignancy, Poignancy!

To be free, the trees and moss!

More greens; radiant splendor.

LOST POEM FOUND I

Last August when my boyfriend and I moved, I lost two of my most valued journals, one of which had a great deal of poetry in it. Last night, Seamus found both of them in an unlikely place, his "empty" laptop box! I feel renewed.....

We searched for whales between shore
and the horizon, thinking shadowed swells
were humpbacks breaching.
The ocean teamed with life
below but we could not see more than

shadows,
shadows that were not whales,
waves,
waves tipped onto the shore,
boats,

a fishing boat that trolled between the jetty
and some unmarked outcrop,
leaving brief brown waves behind it.

The sound of this great ocean drone
drowns out the language beneath it,
a language we will never speak; language
transported on green sea ripples.

The Black Oystercatcher

Before today, they were invisible
and as black as your ink.
while you drew them
I looked in silence
at those birds up there on Pewetole island.

they dove in search of chitons,
in search of food from hard shells,
limpits, mussles and molusks,
they dove down from the island's
sitka spruce,
and made black ink.
you used it
to draw me, up there.

New England Poems for Seamus

I

Old Houses, their
refelctionless windows and walls
date stamped for vindication.
These are the houses of a revolution
seemingly remembered but long forgotten.
The revolts here are between yacht men and teens.
There is a struggle in the iron river.

II

On first look, the river glazed in ice.
The night brought wind and
the ringing of a single bell, chained
above a window outside the house.
On second glance, great chunks
of ice missing, carried away by the wind that rang the bell.

III

This morning the river moved sluggishly,
plates of ice housing the brittle dark banks.
Bridges, iced metal.
Roads from dreams, houses stacked with windows,
an absence of grass, and the red shutters
of a house built for a revolution.

winter is not the time for a poem

december is young;
the ice has already chewed through her.
she is so frozen now that she cannot tell
a poem from a hole in the ground.
There are moments of white and
a series of grey months that do not lead to words.
she sees shadows and shapes that are not there;
glimmers of nothing caught in the pre-dawn silence.
The days will peter out into wordless nights and
she will cut holes in things with a sword.

Mt. St Helens II

There was mockery and spectacle
our backs ached from stooping
like apes
and when the mournful cry
of a lonely elk
rose above us
we
paused only
long enough for impatience to seed;
the elk's tall figure present in imagined moonlight,
a real mystery neglected,
and an omen dead.

Mt. St. Helens I

So dark everywhere that the trees were not remembered
over the sound of our own voices.

Minds
much louder than our fire,
we watched the wings of insects in a
glowlight that wasn't theirs

and reason?

The trees laughed,
their moss a flamable smile for our stupidity.

The Ocean

the ocean is a vast pair of lungs
heaving with catarrh,
swollen with greatness and
swelling with yellow-white froth.

these old lungs suck air like a trumpet
blowing past the stale air inside itself,
giving the ear wanton repetition.

these lungs are only the salt and water
of a great surface and
below this surface some say there are
a mountain of intruders making life.

I know there is nothing down there.

Life below the tumult
of waves hitting lungs
is as unforeseen as an aftershock,
a watered down idea like a drunk's imagination.

suffering is

1. insignificant
enough without thinking
or knowing that the planet
is all one organism.

The mushroom grows
beneath the surface,
spreads its sponge and fiber
across the curve of the earth,
linking with roots of aspen groves,
linking to each other,
linking to themselves.

2. A burn on my arm
is the death of one cell, not many.

And the sea washing over me is
the sea washing over itself.

And a deep shudder of sadness is a
Drop of water from a spray of sea, evaporating.